LIBRARY

This chalkboard sketch is the live graphic facilitation of the Theory U course I am taking currently on EdXU.Lab (which I highly recommend the 0x and 1x). This session in particular was on the relationship between Finance or Money and the Climate. ​This image might be difficult to follow since you weren't there during the session but you see the 7 acupuncture points in the centre (noted only by 1 letter) and the surrounding text around it explains the relationships and the leverage points that currently exist for us to make change in societies across the globe.

Otto Scharmer the founder and professor at MIT speaks about 'N' Nature on the very left and how we are currently consuming 1.5 times the Earth's available resources, as you can tell, we'd be consuming everything if that number was 1, but right now we are in a depleting rate of consumption. The 'C' stands for Capital. We learnt that the current economic system we live in is largely (95%) made up of transactions that are not happening in the real economy. They are happening mostly electronically, created and birthed out of nowhere simply by banks pushing lots of '0' buttons. As Scharmer notes, we need money to build 'the commons', i.e. the public services that the government is in many countries responsible to build or offer to its citizens, rather than supporting the rich to get richer and other banks and corporations to benefit monetarily from the depletion and consumption of the Earth's natural resources.

We are learning in more detail about the specific movements, relationships and attitudes we need to achieve transformation in these 7 areas and the hypothesis is that these will really change things! I am very inspired by the TheoryU movement and I hope you can check them out!

​The image below is the digital version of the 7 acupuncture points, and here is the original blog post Otto Scharmer writes to describe a good summary of the 7 points.

'The Root Issue: Commodity FictionThe essence of transforming capitalism—or creating a new economy, if you prefer that term—is often missed or overshadowed by activities that happen under the headline of pursuing corporate social responsibility. These are worthwhile efforts, as are many of the sustainability-related activities undertaken by business. But a true transformation must deal with an essential design flaw in the core architecture of capitalism.

In his 1944 book The Great Transformation, political economist Karl Polanyi describes this design flaw as commodity fiction. Capitalism, or the market society, as he calls it, is constructed on the foundation of a fiction—namely that nature, labor, and money are commodities; that is, they are produced for the marketplace and for consumption. But, Polanyi argues, nature isn’t produced by us for market consumption. Nor are human beings (labor). And neither is money. But in the market system they are treated as if they are commodities. That’s what he calls commodity fiction.​The result is, according to Polanyi, phenomenal growth on the one hand, but also disastrous negative externalities in the form of environmental destruction, poverty, and cyclical monetary breakdowns. Societies responded to these dysfunctionalities by creating a whole new set of institutional innovations such as standards for labor and the environment, social security, and the federal reserve system—all of which do basically the same thing: suspend market mechanisms where they are not useful.' - Otto Scharmer